In 1988, Joe Strummer embarked on a tour across Britain called ‘Rock Against the Rich’. The tour was endorsed and organised by the anarchist group, Class War. Ian Bone, former leading member of Class War, has published this on the history of the tour.

Amongst a collection of newspapers and journals that I recently obtained, I found a copy of Class War that featured Joe Strummer and the Rock Against the Rich tour. A scan of the paper can be found here.

I also found this on YouTube which is a recording from the tour:

]]>https://hatfulofhistory.wordpress.com/2020/05/29/joe-strummer-class-war-and-rock-against-the-rich/feed/0hatfulofhistoryScreen Shot 2020-05-29 at 12.02.44 amThe book is out!https://hatfulofhistory.wordpress.com/2020/05/15/the-book-is-out/
https://hatfulofhistory.wordpress.com/2020/05/15/the-book-is-out/#respondFri, 15 May 2020 11:30:11 +0000http://hatfulofhistory.wordpress.com/?p=3203I am very excited to announce that my book, No Platform: A History of Anti-Fascism, Universities and the Limits of Free Speech, is out now!

You can order the book from here. Until 31 May, the paperback edition is 20% off and the e-book version is 35% off. Review copies can be ordered here.

I am also really pleased to have the book endorsed by three academics that I really respect. Here they are:

“No platforming is the subject of much polemic but very little in the way of grounded knowledge. No matter how many times activists remind us that choosing not to give a racist, sexist or transphobic speaker a platform is not the same as censoring their words, free speech absolutists say the contrary. In No Platform, Evan Smith has given us a detailed reconstruction of the history of the principle in Britain, avoiding the very polemic that its defenders are accused of, and using student and activist accounts to read ‘against the grain’ of a ‘prevailing narrative’ that constantly undermines the fight against gendered bigotry and racial hate. At a time of rising openness to white supremacism, No Platform is a must-read for all who seek to learn from the past in order to build for a more just future.” – Alana Lentin, Associate Professor of Cultural and Social Analysis, Western Sydney University

“Evan Smith’s No Platform is an essential read for anyone interested in the contemporary reactionary context. Smith offers a lucid, powerful and thoroughly researched history of the no platform tradition and its impact on the moral panics created by the right and the shaping of much of our political discourse today. It is not just an exceptional academic work, it is an incredibly useful and empowering account of why bad ideas cannot be allowed to thrive unchallenged and how they can and should be defeated.” – Aurelien Mondon, Senior Lecturer at the University of Bath (PoLIS Department)

“Evan Smith’s authoritative account of ‘no platform’ politics is both a compelling contribution to the field of far-right studies, and a critical contemporary intervention. Contrary to the lazy assumption that the tactic is nothing more than an anti-democratic refusal of thought and engagement, his nuanced account of its shifting and conflicted historical shape reveals it as a focus through which situated understandings of free speech, democratic expression and political equality have been consistently formed and negotiated.” – Gavan Titley, Senior Lecturer, Department of Media Studies, Maynooth University

]]>https://hatfulofhistory.wordpress.com/2020/05/15/the-book-is-out/feed/0hatfulofhistory9781138591684‘No Platform’ and Hizb ut-Tahrir in the 1990s: A piece for WonkHEhttps://hatfulofhistory.wordpress.com/2020/05/13/no-platform-and-hizb-ut-tahrir-in-the-1990s-a-piece-for-wonkhe/
https://hatfulofhistory.wordpress.com/2020/05/13/no-platform-and-hizb-ut-tahrir-in-the-1990s-a-piece-for-wonkhe/#respondWed, 13 May 2020 10:16:22 +0000http://hatfulofhistory.wordpress.com/?p=3194

Just a quick announcement that I wrote a piece for WonkHE on ‘no platforming’ the Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir at British universities in the 1990s, which is an under-explored part of the history of ‘no platform’. You can find the piece here.

]]>https://hatfulofhistory.wordpress.com/2020/05/13/no-platform-and-hizb-ut-tahrir-in-the-1990s-a-piece-for-wonkhe/feed/0hatfulofhistoryScreen Shot 2020-05-13 at 7.43.53 pmMaoists and Eysenck at LSE, May 1973: Disruptive protest and the prelude to ‘no platform’https://hatfulofhistory.wordpress.com/2020/05/08/maoists-and-eysenck-at-lse-may-1973-disruptive-protest-and-the-prelude-to-no-platform/
https://hatfulofhistory.wordpress.com/2020/05/08/maoists-and-eysenck-at-lse-may-1973-disruptive-protest-and-the-prelude-to-no-platform/#respondFri, 08 May 2020 10:05:46 +0000http://hatfulofhistory.wordpress.com/?p=3175On 8 May, 1973, the controversial psychologist Hans Eysenck attempted to deliver a lecture at the London School of Economics, but faced heavy protests from students. A group of Maoists stormed the stage and assaulted Eysenck. Alongside a sit-in the following month to protest a lecture by US academic Samuel Huntington at the University of Sussex, the shutting down of Eysenck was seen as an example of the grave danger free speech faced at British universities. Occurring less than a year before the ‘no platform’ policy was introduced by the National Union of Students, the Eysenck incident shows that claims that the freedom of speech was under threat at universities has existed for decades and that there has long been debate about the appropriate action to be taken against right-wing speakers who weren’t explicit fascists. Cartoon from the Daily Mirror

Before the NUS formalised its ‘no platform’ policy and put forward a strict position towards the invitation of fascist and far right speakers, the response to individual racist and right-wing speakers was much more haphazard, with various student activist groups reacting in different ways. In the year leading up to the 1974 policy being introduced, there were two incidents that acted as a prelude to a formal policy needing to be implemented. The first was the protest against psychologist Hans Eysenck in May 1973 at the London School of Economics, which attracted student protests, but was marred by the violent actions from members of the tiny Maoist group, the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist). The second was the successful occupation of a lecture theatre at the University of Sussex in June of the same year by student activists in opposition to American academic Samuel P. Huntington, who had previously advised the US government on Vietnam. Both events were portrayed as a serious threat to freedom of speech at British universities, but also met with resistance from within the student unions on both campuses. Prior to the National Union of Students eventually adopting the ‘no platform’ policy, student action against far right speakers on campus was much more varied, with these incidents at the beginning and the end of the era of heightened student radicalism highlighting the localised reactions to the invitation of these speakers.

At this time, Eysenck was part of a controversial circle of psychologists that worked in the area of ‘race’ and IQ, with Eysenck producing a book titled Race, Intelligence and Education in the early 1970s. This ‘scientific racism’, as criticised by radical scientists in Socialist Register, sought to argue that differences in IQ between ‘races’ was informed by genetics.[1] In May 1973, the Social Science Society at LSE invited Eysenck to speak, which was opposed by a number of student groups. One of the most vocal was the LSE Afro-Asian Society, which had links to the tiny Maoist Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist).

The Afro-Asian Society distributed a leaflet prior to the event, titled ‘Fascist Eysenck has no right to speak’, which declared:

Today, fascist Eysenck has been sent by his masters, the British imperialists of the London School of Economics to spew out more of his fascist propaganda. This represents not only a brazen attack on the progressive masses of students and staff at LSE but represents another step in the insidious scheme of British imperialism to provide a rationale to unleash fascist and racist attacks on the broad masses of the English people including the various national minorities.[2]

The Afro-Asian Society characterised Eysenck as a fascist who had no right to speak and that he was using LSE ‘as a platform for his attacks on the working and oppressed people not only of Asia and Africa but also of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales’.[3] The Society saw the opposition to Eysenck as part of a wider struggle against British imperialism, arguing that ‘the broader masses have every right to prevent fascists from doing propaganda for the ruling class’ and called for ‘the progressive LSE students and staff… to exercise their right to oppose the fascist propaganda of H.J. Eysenck’, as well as ‘to vigorously develop mass democracy and mass denounciation [sic] to expose the anti-people and anti-science theories of Eysenck’.[4]

Coverage of the incident in the Daily Telegraph

On 8 May, 1973, Eysenck rose to speak in front of a crowd of around 400 to 500 people at LSE, but as the Daily Telegraph reported, ‘[e]ven before Prof. Eysenck had a chance to begin, heckling, catcalls and obscenities were flung at him’.[5] A vote was taken by the Social Science Society to determine whether Eysenck was to continue, but a section of the crowd was still vocal in their opposition to Eysenck speaking. The President of the London University Conservative Association, who was in attendance, described what happened next for the Daily Telegraph:

About 15 students from the front two rows jumped over the table and dived in with their fists flying. They were hitting out in all directions.[6]

The newspaper further reported that Eysenck had ‘had his spectacles smashed, his nose cut and his hair pulled’.[7]

The actions by the protestors was quickly condemned on all sides, from the media, politicians, other far left groups and the student union. The Chairman of the LSE Social Science Society and former (and future) Labour MP, David Winnick, was quoted in The Guardian as saying, ‘We all deplore the methods used to break up the meeting. They were Fascist-like tactics of hooliganism and physical violence.’[8] Digby Jacks, the President of the NUS and CPGB member, said afterwards, ‘This kind of display will only achieve greater credibility for Eysenck’s views’.[9] An editorial in the Daily Mirror proposed, ‘[a]ny university students who are not prepared to allow peaceful discussion of unpalatable views ought not to be at a university’ and called the students who were involved in ‘a group of hoodlums’.[10] The Under-Secretary of State for the Department of Education and Science, Norman St John-Stevens stated that disagreements with Eysenck needed to be wielded through ‘the weapon of dialogue and rational discourse and not by the fist of the thug’.[11]

Headline from LSE student newspaper The Beaver

Soon after the events unfolded, it was widely conveyed that the Communist Party of England (M-L) were behind the violent disruption, with students allegedly from the University of Birmingham (as well as other Birmingham-based activists) joining the CPE (M-L) members at LSE for their protest – although the Times Higher Education Supplementclaimed that the ‘Afro-Asian Society was prominently represented but its members only shouted interruptions’.[12] The Birmingham Evening Mail reported that ‘Communist revolutionaries at Birmingham University… admitted [their] involvement in the incident when a professor was attacked and prevented from speaking at the London School of Economics.’[13]

The other groups on the left were quick to disassociate themselves from the CPE (M-L). In the Morning Star, the Communist Party of Great Britain railed against the ‘gutter journalism’ of The Sun and other tabloids that attempted to lump the CPGB in with the Maoists.[14] The newspaper proclaimed, ‘Whoever the people were who ignored the wishes of the great majority of LSE students at Tuesday’s meeting and broke it up by violence, they were not Communists’.[15]The International Socialists Society at LSE also condemned the CPE (M-L) in the LSE student newspaper, The Beaver, writing:

According to their philosophy everyone except themselves (and perhaps THE National Front!) are fascists. Reformists are ‘social-fascists’. IS are ‘Trotsky-Fascists’. Heath is a fascist. Eysenck is a fascist. This would be laughable if it were not for the fact that these tactics and politics are a mirror image of those which enabled the Nazis in Germany to come to power, without any real opposition from the Germany [sic] CP. It is extremely lucky that the Maoists have no following in the working class because beneath their physical and verbal militancy they are pursuing a disastrous course.[16]

The Sunday Telegraph suggested that the CPE (M-L) had ‘worried’ other left groups and ‘now found themselves daubed with the same brush as the CPE’.[17] Chiming with the criticisms made by the IS students at LSE, this newspaper article stated that the ‘CPE’s jargon is so absurd a parody of that of other Maoist organisations that it is widely believed among Left-wing students that its funds derive from the Central Intelligence Agency acting in the role of agent provocateur’.[18]Meanwhile the International Marxist Group contingent at LSE criticised the CPE (M-L)’s tactics against Eysenck as a premature anti-fascist reaction, as Eysenck was ‘not organising such a movement in society around his views… and thus the question for many students is turned into a clash over intellectual ideas.’[19] A flyer produced by the LSE Red Mole qualified this by asserting:

In such circumstances tactically, though not in principle it was incorrect to stop Eysenck from speaking as the physical act to prevent him from speaking is not understood by the mass of students at this stage.[20]

LSE Red Mole flyer against university investigation into the incident

There was a call for the universities to expel the students involved in the fracas and for the police to investigate. However there was division in the LSE student union over whether to assist with any university or police investigations. The Times reported that some students felt that ‘since an inquiry was going to be held anyway it was best that the union should conduct it’, but this argument was unsuccessful, with the university administration announcing that they were conducting their own inquiry.[21] After a heated internal debate, the LSE student union declared the following motion:

Whilst deprecating the violence of the two meetings on Tuesday we should prevent any student from being victimised over the incident.

The School is holding an enquiry into the matter; exaggerated press statements have already called for any students involved to be sent down.

We ask every student to refuse to co-operate with the School and to give them absolutely no time at all, or to claim they know nothing about the incidents.[22]

John Carr, the Senior Treasurer of the student union, wrote in The Beaver that the students also sought for the union to apologise to Eysenck and condemn the violence, but this was resisted by the International Socialists present.[23] Tim Potter from the International Socialist Society replied to this, saying that the IS students refused to support a motion to apologise ‘because he is a racist’ and that such a motion ‘would play into the hands of the right-wing reaction’.[24] The IS Society argued that even though they condemned the actions of the CPE (M-L), ‘all socialists must defend them against the right-wing witch-hunt being whipped up by the Press and being put into practice by the College authorities.’[25] The IMG at LSE also warned of a ‘renewed offensive’ by universities and the Conservative government against left-wing students, warning that the Eysenck affair would be used to attack students and the student unions.[26] The IMG further lamented that ‘the attitude of the NUS Executive, the LSE Executive and the Communist Party only reinforces this attack by playing into the hands of the right wing and confuses students as to what is going on’.[27] In the end, however, it seems as though there was no action taken by police with regards to the attack on Eysenck.

Teach-in programme of the LSE Afro-Asian Society organised in the aftermath of the Eysenck protests

The protest against Eysenck at LSE was soon followed by another incident of the shutting down of a lecture by a controversial academic. This time it was American academic Samuel P. Huntington, who was denied access to a lecture hall to address a crowd at the University of Sussex in June 1973. These two incidents were portrayed as a worrying trend by British students as a rejection of academic freedom and the freedom of speech. Inches of column space were dedicated to the spectre of student violence and the apparent end of free speech at British universities. An editorial in the Daily Telegraph proclaimed, ‘[r]ecent events suggest that universities are no longer firmly wedded to free speech and free academic inquiry’.[28] Another editorial in The Guardian questioned:

If in face of such threats [to freedom of speech] university authorities and academic staffs generally decide to nothing, they should not be surprised when Parliament and the public begin to believe that ‘academic freedom’ is a term which has lost its meaning. If the universities cease to defend it, will anyone else?[29]

Although one incident involved violence and the other was a peaceful protest, together these events were portrayed as end to free speech on campus and an example of a violent turn within the student movement – coming at a time when the British authorities and press were becoming more alarmed about the spectre of political violence from the left.[30] The arbitrary nature of these protests gave way to a more formal approach by student unions, empowered by the ‘no platform’ policy at NUS level. However the description of student activists as either ‘fascists’ or ‘Stalinists’ in pursuit of ending free speech at British universities was one that was returned continually throughout the 1970s by politicians, the press and right-wingers, and similar to contemporary descriptions of students involved in protests at universities by right-wing commentators.

This is just an announcement that the special issue of Twentieth Century Communism that I co-edited with Daniel Edmonds and Oleksa Drachewych has been published. The theme is international communism and anti-colonialism in the twentieth century. You can find the whole issue here and the introduction (free to download) here.

I have an article in the issue on the Communist Party of Great Britain and solidarity with the national liberation movement in Zimbabwe. You can find it here.

]]>https://hatfulofhistory.wordpress.com/2020/05/06/new-special-issue-of-twentieth-century-communism-journal/feed/0hatfulofhistory9781912064267-2Watch-along The Young Ones starts this Saturdayhttps://hatfulofhistory.wordpress.com/2020/04/24/watch-along-the-young-ones-starts-this-saturday/
https://hatfulofhistory.wordpress.com/2020/04/24/watch-along-the-young-ones-starts-this-saturday/#respondThu, 23 Apr 2020 23:59:49 +0000http://hatfulofhistory.wordpress.com/?p=3161Looking for some anarchic fun during the lockdown period?

I am starting a weekly watch-along on Twitter of the classic alternative comedy The Young Ones, starting with the debut episode ‘Demolition’ this Saturday night (25/04). I will be tweeting about the show from 9pm Adelaide time (this 9.30pm for the Eastern states and 12.30pm in the UK).

All of the episodes are on YouTube, with the first episode linked below.

Join me (and hopefully others) for discussion of comedy, politics and the history of Thatcherite Britain. Watch-along using the hashtag #WatchingYoungOnes and follow me at @evanishistory.

]]>https://hatfulofhistory.wordpress.com/2020/04/24/watch-along-the-young-ones-starts-this-saturday/feed/0hatfulofhistoryAnti-fascists, the British left and the David Irving libel trialhttps://hatfulofhistory.wordpress.com/2020/04/12/anti-fascists-the-british-left-and-the-david-irving-libel-trial/
https://hatfulofhistory.wordpress.com/2020/04/12/anti-fascists-the-british-left-and-the-david-irving-libel-trial/#commentsSun, 12 Apr 2020 09:33:12 +0000http://hatfulofhistory.wordpress.com/?p=3152Coverage in Searchlight (May 2000)

On 11 April 2000, Mr Justice Gray found in favour of Penguin Books, who had been sued for libel by David Irving after the publication of Deborah Lipstadt’s Denying the Holocaust, which stated:

Irving is one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial. Familiar with historical evidence, he bends it until it conforms with his ideological leanings and political agenda. A man who is convinced that Britain’s great decline was accelerated by its decision to go to war with Germany, he is most facile at taking accurate information and shaping it to confirm his conclusions. A review of his recent book, Churchill’s War, which appeared in New York Review of Books, accurately analysed his practice of applying a double standard to evidence. He demands “absolute documentary proof” when it comes to proving the Germans guilty, but he relies on highly circumstantial evidence to condemn the Allies. (114) This is an accurate description not only of Irving’s tactics, but of those of deniers in general.

Irving had become increasing infamous for his denial of the Holocaust and veneration of Hitler throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, and viewed by many as giving a ‘respectable’ façade to an obsession of the far right.

This was also the time of the rise of the British National Party, which had reignited anti-fascist activism in Britain, with Anti-Fascist Action involved in street clashes with the BNP and the reformed Anti-Nazi League holding large scale demonstrations against the far right. At times, the BNP championed David Irving (a small number of BNP members routinely attended the court proceedings), but at other times, felt that he detracted from the BNP’s own Holocaust denialism. As Mark Hobbs has written, Nick Griffin, a rising figure in the BNP and leader of the party by the time of the decision in the Irving trial, saw Irving as a rival to his own denialism. Irving attracted significant far right support during the trial, but the far right in Britain were quick to downplay their own Holocaust denialism in the 2000s as the BNP sought to become a ‘populist’ anti-immigrationist party.

The Irving trial thus became a lightning rod for both those on the far right who still maintained their anti-Semitism and believed that the Holocaust was a ‘hoax’ and those who saw the trial as a defence of Irving’s free speech to deny the Holocaust (although the libel suit had been brought by Irving against Penguin and Lipstadt).

Opposite to the support that Irving received from the far right, the left and the anti-fascist movement in Britain also followed the trial. Both the Anti-Nazi League and the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight had previously highlighted the problem of Holocaust denial and its links to the far right in Britain, North America and Europe. The ANL had been involved in demonstrations against Irving when he attempted to speak at invited talks and had supported a demonstration outside his house in the 1990s. The Morning Star reported that during the trial, Irving ‘blamed the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight for his reputation as a Holocaust denier’.

Searchlight first mentioned Irving’s legal case in late 1998 and suggested that it had led to ‘relative public inactivity’ by Irving, which left Griffin ‘trying to capture the revisionist limelight’. When returning to the topic of the trial in early 2000, an editorial in Searchlight proposed that the trial ‘could nail the lie once and for all that there is any doubt about the extermination of six million Jews in Europe’. An article by Kate Taylor in the February 2000 edition of the journal stated that consequences of the trial, if the judge found in Irving’s favour, were ‘unthinkable’ and wrote elsewhere that this was because Irving’s pretence of being a serious academic ‘attempt[ed] to give mainstream legitimacy to such destructive ideologies’. Writing on the final days of the trial, Taylor wrote that if Irving won, ‘it will be due to the peculiarities of English libel law and nothing else; it will not condone his position’, but there was a fear that a ruling for Irving would bolster him and other Holocaust deniers.

The Anti-Nazi League did not publish its journal or paper in its reincarnation, but its activities were reported on closely in the Socialist Workers Party’s press. In January 2000, Charlie Kimber in Socialist Worker argued, similarly to Searchlight, that ‘across the world Holocaust deniers look to David Irving’ and stressed that Holocaust denial was part of an attempt to rehabilitate Nazism. Kimber wrote, ‘Holocaust deniers should be confronted whenever they raise their heads, and Irving’s books should be banned from every public, college and school library.’ Another article in the SWP newspaper in March 2000 reported upon the trial revealing that Irving had spoken previously at BNP meetings and had met with BNP members.

The Morning Star, the left-wing daily newspaper with links to the Communist Party of Britain, reported frequently on the trial, although it did not editorialise on the case until after the judgment in April 2000.

When the judgment was handed in April, Mr Justice Gray concluded his ruling with:

Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence; that for the same reasons he has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favourable light, principally in relation to his attitude towards and responsibility for the treatment of the Jews; that he is an active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-semitic and racist and that he associates with right wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism.

Writing in Searchlight, Taylor proclaimed that Gray had ruled ‘in favour of history, truth and reason’ and reported that the judgment showed that Irving, as well as other deniers, were ‘manipulators and distorters who refute the truth in order to serve an ideological agenda’ that was ‘very often neo-nazi in content’. Taylor conceded that this judgment would probably not stop Irving or other deniers from publishing their tracts, but argued that ‘the verdict will deny Irving and his followers mainstream legitimacy and credibility’. Foreseeing one of the main focuses of the far right in the twenty first century, Taylor suggested that ‘[p]erhaps the only medium left for Irving and his Holocaust deniers is the internet’, lamenting that it was difficult to legally fight racism and fascism on the internet.

The Anti-Nazi League reprinted their 1993 pamphlet on Holocaust denial, including details of the trial and the details of Irving’s duplicity that it exposed. The ANL concluded:

Only one description fits Irving. He is a Nazi. He is a falsifier of history who has devoted his life to sanitising the crimes of Hitler to make it easier to build a new Nazi movement today…

His action [against Lipstadt] was not about free speech, establishing the truth, or even recouping royalties lost after publishers withdrew his books. It was simply propaganda for Europe’s new Nazis and the platform Irving desperately craves.

Like Searchlight, the ANL highlighted that the internet was the new arena for Holocaust denial and fascism more generally, calling for anti-fascists and anti-racists to write to Amazon to remove anti-Semitic and racist literature from the website. But the ANL also called for libraries to remove Irving’s books from their shelves.

An editorial in the Morning Star portrayed Irving as pursuing a ‘double career of acting as a pseudo-respectable historian and an apologist for Adolf Hitler’ and that he ‘pushed his luck too far’ with his court case against Lipstadt and Penguin. The editorial repeatedly came to back to the idea that Irving had drifted away from his work as a historian, writing that the judge’s ruling should have ‘remind[ed] him that mere repetition of his training as a historian cannot absolve him from responsibility to base his claims on solid research not parroting the drivel of latter-day nazis.’ It also concluded, ‘[a]s an historian, he had been shown to be a charlatan who has falsified facts to fit in with his own fevered version of history.’ Although as Richard Evans showed at the trial, this was not a recent shift by Irving but something that characterised his work since the beginning.

Anti-Fascist Action, at the forefront of militant anti-fascism in Britain in the 1990s, did not comment much on the trial. After the ruling, AFA called the judgment a ‘reason to celebrate’, but also argued that people should be able to ‘critically discuss the Holocaust’ and claimed that ‘[a]nti-fascists tend to shy away from “difficult” issues’. AFA objected to the calls by Searchlight and the ANL for their calls for ‘censorship’ in the wake of the Irving trial and suggested that this would help foster a sanitised memory of the Holocaust, which ‘doubly damns fascism and exhonerates [sic] liberal democracy’.

Similar sentiment was expressed by Mick Hume, editor of Living Marxism and former leading member of the Revolutionary Communist Party. Caught up in their own libel trial around the same time, Hume said that the Irving trial ‘raise[d] once more an issue that has always concerned us at LM: society’s unhealthy obsession with the Nazi Holocaust’. As Living Marxism believed in absolute free speech and were hostile to the idea of ‘no platforming’ fascists, Hume argued that Holocaust deniers, like Irving, ‘should not be banned, but exposed to public ridicule.’

After the trial, Irving remained a figure on the far right, championed not as much for his Holocaust denial, but his reinvention as a free speech martyr. Although the far right had long used the pretext of free speech to propagate their racist ideologies, this become a recurring trope in the twenty first century. Irving was invited to speak at the Oxford Union in 2001, but this was cancelled after protests from students, academics and other activists. But he was invited again to speak alongside the BNP’s Nick Griffin in 2007, which also attracted significant demonstrations.

Anti-fascists and the left in Britain followed the Irving trial because they recognised that at the centre of the trial was an attempt by Irving to convey legitimacy over his Holocaust denial and understood that Holocaust denial was part of the far right’s attempts to rehabilitate Nazism in the latter half of the twentieth century. There was also some acknowledgment that Irving was using the trial to portray himself as a free speech martyr, even though he had been the one to initiate the legal proceedings. While it was noted that Irving and other Holocaust deniers were using the internet to disseminate their propaganda, back in the year 2000 there seemed to be an underestimation of central the internet would become to the organisation of the far right and the spread of far right ideas.

While Irving’s stature on the far right somewhat diminished after the trial (and his jailing in Austria) and Holocaust denial was no longer central to the far right in the new century, the case was still important for anti-fascists in Britain – it discredited Irving’s attempts to portray himself as a historian and cemented the links between him and the organisations of the far right, such as the BNP. But it also foreshadowed the role that free speech would play in far right discourses in the future, at a time when the far right was trying to reinvent itself.

These calls are misleading because there is a long history of students attempting to prevent controversial figures from speaking at Oxford, through the formal use of a ‘no platform’ policy, or by picketing, or disrupting the event in some way. Pressure and protests from students has led to the revoking of invitations to speak on several occasions, while at other times, speakers have sought to face down hostile crowds (both successfully and unsuccessfully).

In the early 1960s, former British Union of Fascist leader Oswald Mosley was invited to speak at the university by student groups. In a 1961 debate on apartheid South Africa with future Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe, students heckled and attempted to disrupt Mosley from speaking. Mosley’s newspaper Action complained about the ‘ape-like grunts, yells, screams from hysterical females, and even rattles’ coming from protestors in the audience. A few days later, Mosley spoke again at Oxford, this time to the Humanist Group, debating Marxist scholar Raymond Williams. The student newspapers at Oxford, Cherwell reported on the hostile reception that Mosley received:

Heckling, hisses and boos swelled from an opening disturbance to an overwhelming uproar at Sir Oswald Mosley’s address on ‘Racial Purity’ on Tuesday. Shouting at the top of his voice, Sir Oswald was finally drowned out by chants of ‘Seig Heil’, cheers for Hitler and choruses of booing…

Violent protests and allegations from the largest-ever Humanity [sic] Group audience, packed into The Taylorian, interrupted Sir Oswald’s speech constantly, and his voice was drowned in uproar…

In 1966, the neo-Nazi Colin Jordan was invited to speak by the Oxford Union, but as Paul Jackson notes, ‘this event was subsequently cancelled as the organizers felt that the event would only end up being wrecked by opponents.’

After the National Union of Students introduced the policy of ‘no platform’ in April 1974, it quickly became a flashpoint. Harold Soref, a right-wing Tory MP and Vice Chairman of the Monday Club (an anti-immigration and pro-empire pressure group within the Conservatives), was invited by the Oxford University Monday Club branch. One of the purposes of this invitation, the Oxford branch president admitted, was to openly challenge the ‘no platform’ policy taken by the NUS.

However things did not go according to plan for Soref or the Oxford branch of the Monday Club. Around 20 to 40 students disrupted Soref during his speech, smashing a window of a barricaded door to enter the Monday Club meeting. The Daily Telegraph reported that while the audience tried to prevent the demonstrators from gaining access to the room, ‘Mr Soref, escorted by a posse of students, fled down a back staircase, clambered over a six-foot wall and was driven off at high speed in a waiting yellow sports car’. Although the action was condemned by the Oxford University Student Union and the leaders of the Conservative, Labour and Liberal clubs at the university, the protest did demonstrate the level of opposition that some students had to the hard right politics of the Monday Club, which at the time had some crossover with the National Front, but also with Enoch Powell.

In November of the same year, the Brasenose Debating Society had invited the National Front’s Patrick Harrington to speak (who had previously been the subject of massive student protest at North London Polytechnic throughout 1984). This led the student union at Oxford to implement a ‘no platform’ policy, encouraged by the Socialist Workers’ Student Society and the Student Union’s Anti-Racist Committee. The Committee argued that Harrington’s ‘mere presence [was] an insult to students, especially non-whites’ and that ‘[t]here should be no racist platforms in the University – they lend enormous credibility to such views.’ The NUS supported this approach and the NUS Policy Officer was quoted in Cherwell as saying:

However academic the debate in Brasenose may be, the fact is that Harrington has been on record as endorsing firebombing attacks on NF opponents and shouldn’t be given any platform at all.

This upset the Oxford University Conservative Association, which led a campaign to have the policy overturned. Eventually a referendum was held by the student union on the policy in February 1986. This occurred at the same time as hard right Tory MP, John Carlisle, was invited to speak at Oriel College by the Monday Club branch at Oxford.

This came a short time after protestors had been in an altercation with Carlisle at Bradford University. Scheduled to speak in the ‘Nelson Mandela’ room at Oriel, the room was occupied by about 120 protestors from the SWP, the Labour Club, Oxford Against Racism and the Oxford Anti-Apartheid group. Upon advice from the police, the Monday Club decided to cancel Carlisle’s talk at the university and under police escort, travelled to the city centre, where Carlisle addressed a very small audience. Speaking to Cherwell, Carlisle complained:

It’s a sad day when Oxford University students prevent an MP from putting his views forward. What worries me about tonight is that it’s a copycat demonstration – just mimicking Bradford.

The President of Oxford University’s Monday Club, Simon Clow, criticised the police for being ‘too eager to avoid trouble rather than protect free speech’.

In 2001, the Oxford Union invited Holocaust denier David Irving, who had lost a high profile libel case the previous year. Protests came from the NUS, the Association of University Teachers and Lord Janner from the All-Party Parliamentary War Crimes Group, with the AUT General Secretary suggesting that the union would contemplate an academic boycott of the Oxford Union. Eventually the Oxford Union rescinded the invitation in the face of these protests.

It sets a really disturbing precedent. The Union being a student run society, it sends out the wrong sort of message. All this is doing is giving them a platform in a prestigious arena…

On the night of the debate, protestors forced their way into the building where the debate was taking place in an attempt to disrupt the event. While students had previously had success with ‘no platforming’ Griffin at various universities (such as Cambridge, St Andrews and Bath), they were not able to successfully disrupt the event at Oxford.

The controversy over the disinvitation of Amber Rudd (the details of which are not fully known yet) should be seen within a longer history of student actions against controversial speakers at Oxford University. On some occasions, students have been able to compel the cancellation or disinvitation of certain speakers, whereas on other occasions, students have sought to physically or vocally disrupt speakers. Those concerned with the contemporary ‘crisis’ of free speech at British universities suggest that ‘no platforming’ right wing politicians and other figures is something new and that students are much more censorious nowadays. However the actions at Oxford University since the 1960s, replicated at other universities across the country over the last six decades, show that this is not the case. Press hysteria and outrage from politicians about the alleged shutting down of free speech at Oxford (and elsewhere) has existed since the 1960s – a perpetual crisis or merely the playing out of similar tropes by the right?

A common term used in online left-wing discourses is ‘tankie’. It has been used to describe those who are self-identified Marxist-Leninists and those who defend ‘actually existing socialism’ in its various guises (such as the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, the Eastern Bloc, Cuba, Vietnam and North Korea). As an extension of this, ‘tankie’ has also been used to describe people who defend regimes in alliance with Russia and China in the twenty-first century, primarily concerning the Assad government in Syria nowadays.

The connotation of the term alludes to the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Afghanistan in 1979 (as well as martial law Poland in 1980), suggesting that those who supported the Soviet Union in these incursions were endorsing the use of tanks to crush their opposition (supposed counter-revolutionaries, the bourgeoisie, imperialists, etc). Although China opposed both the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and of Afghanistan in 1979, many contemporary supporters of the Chinese Communist Party are viewed as ‘tankies’.

The term ‘tankie’ harks back to the events of 1956 and 1968, but became prominent in the 1980s, when the press reported upon the internal divisions within the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). Since the late 1970s, there had been a debate inside the CPGB over the industrial and political strategies of the party. Although the divisions were somewhat fluid, there was a traditionalist wing, who were largely pro-Soviet, and promoted that trade union work should be the primary function of the party, and there was a reformer wing, who were more ambivalent about the USSR, and suggested that the party needed take seriously the new social movements of anti-racism, women’s liberation and gay rights (amongst others). The traditionalists argued that class politics was the predominant framework for the party’s activism, while the reformers argued that class politics overlooked other forms of oppression and that the politics of identity were important for mobilising people. These divisions took place against the backdrop of Thatcherism and the weakening on the trade unions and the left in Britain throughout the 1980s. Because of the inspiration of Eurocommunism on many of the reformers, this wing of the party, largely associated with the journal Marxism Today, were known colloquially as the ‘Euros’. On the other side, the traditionalist wing, largely associated with the newspaper Morning Star, were called ‘tankies’ because of their continued support for the Soviet Union. However it is worth noting that some of the prominent ‘tankies’ in the 1980s had actually criticised the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. There was also another ‘tankie’ faction within the CPGB called Straight Left, who opposed the Eurocommunist tendencies of the party in the 1980s, but also avoided those associated with the Morning Star.

Anecdotally, it seems that term ‘tankie’ emerged in the 1970s as a pejorative term to describe those who supported the Soviet actions in 1968 and was used in internal disputes, especially around the 1977 revamping of the CPGB programme, The British Road to Socialism, where Eurocommunist ideas reached the upper echelons of the party. The 1977 programme emphasised new social movements as part of a ‘broad democratic alliance’, which caused a pro-Soviet section of the party to leave to form the pro-Stalin New Communist Party (headed by Sid French). The NCP were the archetypal ‘tankies’ and probably referred to by their opposition within the CPGB, although none of the polemical documents created inside the CPGB use the term nor does any of the coverage of the 1977 split by any of the CPGB’s rivals on the far left that has been uncovered so far. As Willie Thompson wrote in his 1992 history of the CPGB:

‘Sectarians’, ‘traditionalists’ and ‘Stalinists’ were all employed, the first being favoured in formal debate, although in private conversation it was usually ‘tankie’, from the support this faction had given to the Czechoslovak invasion.

By 1983, the schism between the traditionalists and the reformers was hardening, with those associated with the Morning Star and the party’s Industrial Department (responsible for trade union work) becoming increasingly critical of the journal Marxism Today and the party leadership. The party tried to instil discipline at the 1983 National Congress of the CPGB and over the next few years, there were a series of expulsions and resignations from the traditionalist wing. These members (and former members) were referred to as ‘tankies’ in the coverage of the CPGB split in the far left press in Britain.

The Oxford English Dictionary and the New Statesman both cite an article in The Guardian in May 1985 as the first instance of the term being used in the mainstream press. However The Times used the term in September 1984 when reporting on the Morning Star appointing a new Moscow correspondent, although it seems to attribute the editorship of the newspaper erroneously to the Eurocommunist side of the CPGB dispute.

The Times, 12 September, 1984

By the late 1980s, as the CPGB further imploded before dissolving in 1991, the term ‘tankie’ had become a common place term to describe the pro-Soviet factions inside the CPGB and those who existed outside it, such as the newly formed Communist Party of Britain. As the history of the CPGB began to be written in the 1990s and 2000s, the internal battles of the Communist Party were often depicted as between the ‘Euros’ and the ‘tankies’, although most acknowledged that this was a simplification of the contest within the party.

From its origins within the British left in the 1970s and 1980s, the term has now taken on a new life on the internet, with ‘tankie’ used by the online left across the world. As we move further away from the specific Cold War context in which the term was first used, it has taken on a life of its own, with many not aware of its original background.

For those interested in the pro-Soviet factions inside and outside the Communist Party of Great Britain, I would recommend Lawrence Parker’s The Kick Inside: Revolutionary Opposition in the CPGB, 1945-1991, which can be ordered from here.

In September 2017, I travelled to Hamilton, Canada to take part in a workshop held at McMaster University on the Communist International and anti-colonialism, ‘race’ and national liberation, organised by Oleksa Drachewych and Ian McKay. I spoke about my research on the Communist Parties in Britain, Australia and South Africa and anti-colonialism in the inter-war period.

I am pleased to announce that the edited volume arising from the workshop, Left Transnationalism: The Communist International and the National, Colonial and Racial Questions, has been published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. It includes my chapter, ‘Anti-Colonialism and the Imperial Dynamic in the Anglophone Communist Movements in South Africa, Australia and Britain’.